More FU3 and XP SP2 woes!

[Guest lakota]

Hi folks,After searching around on here and trying the nomovie tip and eventually downloading the Indeo Codecs I still can't get FU3 to run without crashing and showing the old "FU3 has encountered a problem and needs to close" box. It's really bugging me.I have the orginal LG version and have just reinstalled after a long absence.I managed to get the movie to play but after it finishes that's when I get the error box now. It does the same thing even with the nomovie line in the .cfg file.Any ideas please? I run a Sony A117S laptop with ATI Radeon 9700 graphics on board. I updated using the Version 2 patch already.

[Guest lakota]

Another thing I just found.It will run if I execute the Flight3.exe from the CD and seems to be OK. It continues to crash if I use the Flight3.exe file from my HDD! How annoying is that?If I run via the CD then I can't use any of the extra planes I've just spent all night downloading. AAAgghhhhh!

[Guest lakota]

Hey all,Kinda fixed my own problem here.The last post gave me an idea. It worked from CD because there were no other planes installed.So by process of elimination I removed all the extra plane files I'd put in the PLNPILE directory.It turned out to be a flight model file for the SR71 that I'd left in there by accident.Once I removed that it works fine. :(

[Hans_Petter 1]

Which illustrates an important point -- FU3 is susceptible to crashing whenever something is wrong, even when the corrupt or missing file may seem to be irrelevant to your current flight. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a fan of this sim but I would have preferred a more robust handling of errors. What I mean is, a bad aircraft should be of no consequence unless you select that specific aircraft -- a missing texture or a corrupt model shouldn't affect anything but the rendering of that specific model/object. Alas, that's not the way it is. It seems that FU3 goes through everything and anything as the sim is being launched and a lot of obscure errors may cause it to quit. The only way to stay out of trouble is to add enhancements incrementally, always being prepared to "roll back" if the sim misbehaves. Evidently, this means that one has to be aware of what one has added or modified since last time it worked flawlessly. Hans Petter